My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I’m ashamed of what I think of doctors in general.
I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the “Professional Building.” I felt better right away.
People coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.
Who ever said that doctors are truthful or even intelligent? You’re getting a lot if they know their profession. Don’t ask any more from them. They’re only human, after all.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
The . . . patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life. Don’t take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop.
In order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character; that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
One day Joseph Lister was summoned to assist a wealthy lord with a fishbone that had lodged at the back of his throat. After Lister had skillfully removed the obstruction, the grateful patient asked him what he was owed. “My lord,” Lister suggested, “suppose we settle for half of what you would be willing to give me if the bone were still lodged in your throat.”
Financial ruin from medical bills is almost exclusively an American disease.
America’s healthcare system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
The field of Western medicine has become literally nothing but medicine. Doctors are on their way out, to be replaced by self-serve pharmaceutical vending machines.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
In the sick room, ten cents’ worth of human understanding equals ten dollars’ worth of medical science.
In medicine, as in statecraft and propaganda, words are sometimes the most powerful drugs we can use.
The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around. . . . Throughout history, “tender loving care” has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.
Oh, the powers of nature. She knows what we need, and the doctors know nothing.
I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.
Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that; it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself. It will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.
Now and then, at the sulfur baths, I meet a perfect specimen of health and vitality who was given up by the doctors years ago. They all tell the same story; they forgot their ailments, they ignored them, they found something to do — something of a serviceable nature — which made them forget themselves.
